Dead Water

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Perez arranged to meet Willow for lunch. He wanted to tell her what they’d learned from Jen Belshaw and from the check-in guy at Scatsta, but not as a formal presentation with all the team listening in. He was feeling his way through this investigation and scraps of theory were blowing around his brain. Motes of dust in a sunbeam. He thought they’d disappear if he put them into words, but a gentle discussion might help him to organize his ideas.

They met at the Bonhoga and took a table in the conservatory, looking out over the burn. It was late, so the place was quiet.

‘So, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘What do you have to tell me?’ Willow was smiling and girlish and he thought she must have information for him too, but wanted to hang on to it for a while, to hug it to herself.

He was eating a bannock with smoked salmon and watercress and it was so good that he had to give it his full attention for a moment. Willow had her back to the light, so the wild hair looked almost red. She was completely absorbed in the task of drinking soup. Smelling it. Tasting it. Then she smiled again.

‘Wow! This is something else. He’s a brilliant cook.’

He loved the fact that something as simple as good lentil soup could make her happy. Her arm was on the table, her sleeve rolled up a little, so that he could see fine hairs on her arm. In this light they looked red too. Today she was in a baggy sweatshirt and he caught himself wondering what shape she was underneath it, and then imagining her completely naked. Small breasts. Flat stomach. Larger hips, slightly out of proportion. The picture appeared from nowhere and shocked him, but gave him a thrill of excitement too. What would it feel like to run his hand over the body? Horrified, he banished the image from his mind. The power of the picture he’d conjured frightened him. This wasn’t art – a nude that Fran might have created with a few charcoal sketches – but real flesh, muscle, hair. He felt that his imagination and his body were out of control.

She looked up at him, completely unaware that he was disturbed, and repeated her question.

‘Well? What do you have to tell me?’

‘Evie seems to have been disturbed on Friday night,’ he said. ‘I mean really disturbed. Jen Belshaw was her friend and said she’d never known her like it. Evie was drinking very heavily. It was her hen party, but nobody expected her to get drunk like that. She’s not the kind.’

‘I’m sorry, Jimmy.’ Willow leaned across the table towards him. ‘I just don’t see Evie Watt as our killer. And even if I could be persuaded that she’d killed Jerry in some flash of temper, there’s no way she’d have gone on to murder John Henderson. It’s not possible. You saw what she was like when we visited her on Fetlar. Her world had fallen apart.’

Perez looked at Willow, allowing no thoughts but those relating to the investigation. ‘I’m not suggesting that Evie is a killer. Though I don’t think we should rule out that possibility.’ He was still convinced this was a domestic murder, despite the melodrama. ‘I’m saying that she had contact with Jerry Markham. More contact than some unanswered phone messages.’

‘I’m not sure. I think she would have told me if that was the case. We got on fine. Why wouldn’t she?’

The question hung between them. Perez returned to his food without answering. He wondered if Willow’s judgement was compromised.

‘Evie Watt is not a liar.’ Willow couldn’t let it go. ‘I just can’t accept it. She’s a decent woman who got pissed on her hen night. There’s no more to it than that.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’ Perez shrugged. ‘But we should keep an open mind.’

‘Anything else?’ Willow was eyeing up the cakes through the open door. Making it clear that she didn’t need telling how to do her job.

‘I have definite evidence that Jerry Markham and John Henderson met on that Friday afternoon.’

‘What sort of evidence?’ He had her full attention now.

Perez described his meeting with the Scatsta employee.

‘What time was that?’

‘Around two-thirty. Just before the fog came down and stopped all the flights.’

‘Might that explain why Evie was behaving so weirdly on Friday evening?’ Willow asked. She wiped a piece of bread around her soup bowl, then ate it. ‘If Henderson had told her he’d met Markham. She’d be angry, wouldn’t she, that Markham was back, meddling with her life. Angry with both of them for getting together behind her back. It would seem almost as if they were ganging up on her. Or making decisions about her future without consulting her. As if she was a little girl.’

Perez thought about this.

‘What decision could there be to make?’ he said. ‘John and Evie were going to be married. No question. Markham hadn’t seen her for years. What could he want to tell Henderson? Something that might persuade him to break off the engagement at the last minute? Is that what you’re suggesting? It would certainly explain Evie’s weird behaviour at the hen do, if that was the case.’

‘I don’t know!’ Willow put her head in her hands, a dramatic gesture. She had to push her hair away from her face. ‘It’s so frustrating. We’re getting glimpses of a picture, but just not seeing enough to tell what really happened.’ She paused, struggling to explain. ‘Like a reflection in a broken mirror.’

‘Phone records might help,’ Perez said. ‘It would be useful to know if Henderson spoke to Evie after he saw Markham, and before she went out for the hen night.’

‘Of course they would! I’m still waiting for them, though. Some computer meltdown with the provider. I meant to chase them up again this morning.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you think the meeting at Scatsta had a more obvious outcome? Did John Henderson kill Markham?’

Perez had been thinking about that. ‘I can’t see how it might have happened. If we’d found the body out there, on the old RAF site, then I’d accept it. A row that blew into something more violent. But according to Sinclair, Henderson was only out of the office for an hour. I can’t see that he’d have had time to drive south and set up the ambush, never mind stage the scene in the marina at Aith. And while he was the kind of man – calm, repressed even – who might have a flash of temper, I don’t think that planning would have been in character at all. He had too much of a conscience.’

‘Unlike the Fiscal.’ Willow grinned. The schoolgirl about to reveal her secret.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I should have been in my office chasing up phone records this morning, but I ended up taking our Rhona out for coffee instead.’

‘Did you now?’ Perez found his response to the detective was becoming more natural.

‘I took her to the Islesburgh Centre.’ Willow grinned. ‘No expense spared.’

‘Not the Fiscal’s natural habitat,’ Perez said.

‘She was all right,’ Willow said. ‘Expansive for her.’

‘And?’

‘She and Richard Grey – known to her as Dickie – were lovers in the dim and distant past. She was, and I quote, one of his serial affairs. It was before his wife ran off with her secret lover, but our Rhona had no conscience at all.’

Perez tried to take this in. ‘Any bearing on the killings, do you think?’

‘I’ve been trying to work out how, but I can’t see it.’ Willow gave in to temptation and went to the counter for lemon-drizzle cake, waved to Perez to ask if he wanted anything. He shook his head. On her return she continued as if there’d been no break. ‘I wondered if Jerry Markham had found out about the affair, if Annabel or Richard had given away our Rhona’s raunchy past. But why would they? Surely Annabel never knew about it. She was only five when it was all happening. And even if Markham had discovered that the Fiscal and Richard Grey had a fling fifteen years ago, what could he possibly do with the information? It hardly turns Rhona Laing into a potential blackmail victim.’

‘No.’ Perez considered how this might relate to the theories spinning around in his head. ‘The only person who’d be hurt by the affair being made public would be Annabel. She obviously dotes on her father and believes in the public persona of respectable family man, given to charitable good work.’

‘And Richard might be hurt too,’ Willow said. ‘Annabel obviously worships him. I imagine that relationship would take a bit of a nosedive if she found out about his sordid past.’

‘We know Grey disliked Jerry and didn’t want him as a son-in-law.’ Willow stretched. The loose sleeves of her shirt fell back to her shoulders. Perez turned away briefly. ‘I’d have him down as a ruthless kind of man, but I can’t believe he’d come all the way to Shetland to commit murder. He’d have more subtle ways of warning Jerry off.’

‘How did Rhona seem to you?’ Perez remembered the message left on his answer machine.

‘OK. A bit jumpy at first. But happy to talk about Richard Grey. Reliving the passions of her youth maybe.’ Willow was getting to her feet. ‘Why?’

‘She wanted to talk to me, but I haven’t been able to get hold of her. Obviously nothing urgent, or she’d have got back to me.’

Willow was fishing in her bag for her purse, but Perez told her he’d settle the bill. ‘I want a chat with Brian anyway.’

She turned to him, on her way out. ‘What’s this, Jimmy? I hope you’re not going freelance on me again.’ A joke, but also a warning.

‘If I have anything,’ he said, ‘you’ll be the first to know.’

She nodded and ran up the stairs, her hair flying behind her.

Brian made them both tea and they sat outside so that he could have a cigarette. There was a gusty breeze and he cupped his hand around it to get it lit.

‘What is it now, Jimmy? People will be talking if you keep coming in here. You know Shetland. They have long memories. There’s no escaping the past, even if you want to.’

Perez looked along the valley towards Weisdale Voe.

‘It’s about Jerry Markham again. The meeting he had here the day he died. I wondered if you’d thought any more about it. Can you remember who paid, for instance?’

Brian glanced inside to check that there were no late customers. ‘I wouldn’t know who paid. I just give them the bill and they pay in the shop upstairs.’

‘Who came to the counter for the bill? You’d get a better look then.’

‘Do you know how many people I serve in here on a busy day?’ He dragged on the cigarette.

‘But this was Jerry Markham. A bit of a local celebrity. You’d have noticed, wouldn’t you? Hoped for a tip?’

‘Well, I always hope.’ He pulled his jacket around his huge body, leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes. ‘Markham came to get the bill,’ he said.

‘How did he seem?’

Brian looked at Perez. ‘I don’t know. A bit preoccupied. I had to tell him twice that the till was upstairs. When he was living in Shetland we took the money down here. And sad. He looked sad.’

Perez gave no response. He didn’t want to break Brian’s concentration. ‘And the woman? Was she with him then?’

Brian seemed to sleep again. ‘The woman walked off. She didn’t wait for him. She must have had her own car. Unless she was going to the Ladies.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Look, Jimmy, this is all speculation. You wouldn’t get a court to accept any of this as evidence.’

‘And I wouldn’t call you as a witness,’ Perez said. ‘Honestly.’ He wondered if this had been worrying Brian all along, that he might have to go through the stress of a court case. Reliving unhappy memories. He felt stupid that it hadn’t occurred to him before. ‘So the woman,’ he went on. ‘Can you describe her to me again? One witness described her as middle-aged. Is that how you remember her?’

‘I don’t know, Jimmy! Maybe. Maybe she was younger. Some women could be any age from twenty to fifty, don’t you think? And I wasn’t really noticing. As I said before, it was busy in here.’

‘And she was one of those women it’s hard to age?’

Brian nodded. Perez slipped a photograph from a brown envelope and rested it on Brian’s knee. He said nothing and waited for a reaction. Brian picked it up, holding it carefully by the edges.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. ‘But yes, this could be her.’

He handed the picture of Evie Watt back to Perez.